04 July 2007

Peace on hold in the PKK’s Iraq hideouts

By Steve Negus
Financial Times, 21 June 2007

At the crest of a winding gorge, beneath the crags of northern Iraq’s Qandil mountain range, stand two flagpoles marking the entrance to territory controlled by the Kurdistan Workers’ party, or PKK. Keeping watch from a hillside above is a concrete portrait of Abdullah Ocalan, the rebel leader now imprisoned by the Turkish government.

Farther up the valley, a cinderblock village house contains the PKK’s improvised public relations bureau, where officials occasionally meet the foreign press. This is as far as outsiders are allowed to go – for the time being.

The PKK guerrillas apologise that they cannot take a visiting FT correspondent on the usual press tour of their mountain encampments. With Turkish forces threatening to attack, “security concerns” make such a trip impossible.

Their Qandil base, and two smaller enclaves closer to Turkey, have for the past two months been drawing world attention, with the Turkish military saying it is ready to strike across the border at the PKK as soon as it gets the green light from Ankara’s civilian leaders.

Dozens of Turkish soldiers have been killed in recent months in clashes with the PKK inside Turkey, and the Kurdish guerrillas have been blamed for bombings that have caused civilian casualties, prompting the calls for a military assault.

Both the Iraqi government and the US have urged Ankara not to attack.

Qandil is close to the Iranian border, whose highly defensible mountain valleys have traditionally been used as strongholds by Kurdish dissident groups.

On the other side of these mountains are the bases of the PJAK, an Iranian Kurdish guerrilla group, linked to the PKK, which many Kurds suspect receives US backing to put pressure on the regime in Tehran.

Rustem Cudi, a soft-spoken Syrian Kurd who sits on the PKK’s executive committee, denies that the movement – which declared the latest in a series of a unilateral ceasefires last week – stages military operations from its Iraq bases, maintaining that they were used only for political and media work.

Iraqi Kurdish officials also deny there are cross-border incursions, but say privately that they have no love for the PKK which, during its hardline Marxist days, condemned them as traitors.

They urge Ankara to pursue a political solution – to what they characterise as a Turkish domestic problem – with the PKK by offering an amnesty to combatants and generally improving Turkey’s record on Kurdish human rights. For its part, the PKK says it will require more than an amnesty to get its fighters to lay down their weapons. “We didn’t go to the mountains [just] to be forgiven,” says Mr Cudi.

Kurds in Iraq say that while Turkey’s civilian government – particularly under the current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan – has made considerable strides towards solving that country’s “Kurdish problem”, many people still face harassment from a military and security apparatus that considers any manifestation of Kurdish identity to be treasonous against the Turkish state.

Mr Cudi says a real breakthrough would probably require some “fundamental changes” in the Turkish state, in which a highly nationalist military that is traditionally hostile to Kurdish identity is still largely unaccountable to the civilian government.

But the PKK is, none the less, trying to change its image from the hardline separatist organisation of the 1980s and 1990s, when its reputation for brutality, including attacks on fellow Kurds, resulted in it being designated a terrorist organisation by the US and and the European Union.

Shortly after Mr Ocalan’s capture by Turkish intelligence in 1999, the movement dropped its call for separatism and said it would strive for Kurdish rights through peaceful politics. The PKK is believed to have ties with leftwing Kurdish parties in Turkey, and says it would welcome dialogue with other Turkish groups.

However, it has not relinquished its armed forces. Mr Cudi says they will stand by to defend the organisation. And while the movement may have renounced an “ethnic-based state” – an independent Kurdistan – it may yet return to its separatist roots.

“If other states [with a Kurdish minority] continue to solve the problem through violence, then we will rethink this,” he says. “We still have the possibility, and we have the power, in order to establish such an ethnic-based state.”

For the time being there is little likelihood that the PKK will be able to achieve the entry into peaceful Turkish politics that it claims to seek.

Mr Erdogan may not be enthusiastic about the army’s calls for an attack into Iraq, but he has backed the military campaign to “dissolve the shelter of terrorism inside Turkey”.

The prime minister is facing a landmark parliamentary election on July 22, in which his Islamist-leaning Justice and Development party faces a strong challenge to its nationalist credentials. Few Turkish politicians would risk looking soft on an organisation that most Turks still view as irredeemably terrorist.

The PKK and its guerrillas will probably not be forced out of their mountain stronghold by military action, but they will also probably not be coming down peaceably any time soon.

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Citation: Steve Negus. "Peace on hold in the PKK’s Iraq hideouts," Financial Times, 21 June 2007.
Original URL: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/608272f0-1f76-11dc-ac86-000b5df10621,dwp_uuid=fc3334c0-2f7a-11da-8b51-00000e2511c8,print=yes.html
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